Elegy
       

Early on in the city
on weekends claimed by fog
I came back to your farmstead,
your emptied creek-side
shanty house,
from my laboratory wage work
with pockets full of micropipettes
and stolen white gloves as if to outfit a regiment
of ghost butlers
in an imagined antebellum manor
neither of us, if offered, would inhabit
but I still saw the manor's cut crystal
glinting in night-frost on the fescue
beneath persimmon trees
where great horned owls left
bones to bleach. These nights
lately—with the fine rain singing
through ragweed, through mulberry
we'd kept for feeding ducks, the silkworm
farm we planned
to someday have—-I swim
the wild wheat that shines
like a lake to far back acres. I unstring
my jewelry, tarnishing from its work week
even still—in the city of Booted brick and grimy
air—-from my neck
and wrists, spread the legs
of the wooden-runged ladder and hang
it in arcs inside the fig bower's
ribcage or hay rick,
displayed like ceremonial
specimens pinned to felt-lined glass cases
by the fig's knobby twigs. Deprived of ceremony
I find nothing
in my hands but unmoored
symbols: one week I caught june bugs in ajar every night
to feed the ducks,
or once burnt so methodically old letters
from lovers and the First National Bank alike,
as if a prayer summoning spirits
to the occasion could ever come
from cynics' lips. To look down
for the layers of history cat's-cradling
between us, which, unwillingly—
as algae on creek stones
loosed downstream rejoins indistinct matter—
we forget.

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Copyright © 2013 Miriam Bird Greenberg All rights reserved
from All night in the new country
Sixteen Rivers Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission